Ratio question, please help

There are 3 crates of apples A, B and C. The ratio of the number of apples in crate A to crate B to crate C is 8 : 5 : 3. David removed 42 apples from crate A and placed them into crate C. as such, there are 2 more apples in crate C than crate B. How many apples are there altogether?

You check and see that if you add 42 to 60 you get 102 which is 2 more than 100 and these crates are in the proper ratios, thus the answer is correct. Well done wilmer, hope you don't mind me jumping in here, I just saw that you were not signed in and didnt want gwen to wait for a response.

There are 3 crates of apples A, B and C. The ratio of the number of apples in crate A to crate B to crate C is 8 : 5 : 3. David removed 42 apples from crate A and placed them into crate C. as such, there are 2 more apples in crate C than crate B. How many apples are there altogether?

You are given the ratio, and told that there are at least 42 items in A (else how could 42 be remove, right?), so one way to start might be to list triples in the given ratio, with the first value being 42 or larger. We can safely assume that we are dealing with whole numbers, so:

...and so forth. Notice the pattern: at each stage, the difference decreases by 2. Clearly, we'll need nine more decreases (a difference which is 18 smaller than 20) to get what we need. To get "88" for A, we multiplied the original ratio by 11. In nine more steps, we'll be multiplying by 20: